In 1978, David Bailey wrote that after the “thesis” on the Mexican Revolution, we saw in the ’60s and ’70s the triumph of the “anti-thesis” with revisionism, but that we were still waiting for the “synthesis”; it looks as though we are now receiving it by way of Alan Knight. “Unfashionably long” (1,000 pages of text, 224 pages of notes), “ambitious in scope, and, perhaps, narrative in form” (I, ix), it is a history of the revolution during its military phase (1910-20). It is comprehensive, nationalistic, shows great originality, and is the closest thing to date to a definitive history written by a single author. It is nationalistic because it takes into account local and regional variations, without important exception—that is quite a challenge—and delves below the level of high politics and diplomacy. As Knight says, there can be no high politics without a good deal of low politics.
The author’s aims have been achieved, and this book must stand in the personal library of every scholar interested in Mexico and in its revolution. It is an ambitious combination of analysis and narration, and of primary and secondary sources, in English, French, Spanish, and German. The author’s discussions are wide ranging, as are his investigations; he confirms the excellence of the consular reports, and makes splendid use of the thousands of pieces written on the subject: first-generation memoirs, “engagé” studies, pamphlets, the growing production of microhistories, and newspaper articles.
Knight shifts from narrative to analysis and back again easily. He shows a taste for excursions into theory and comparisons with other revolutions and rebellions. “In doing so I have probably pleased no one entirely, and offended everybody somewhat,” writes Knight. Without being ad hominem, Knight throws stones in everybody’s garden, and, for the most part, I am personally delighted with his effort it teaches a lot and destroys many, many fallacies. Knight presents people, regions, and forgotten classical stories, such as the slaughter of the Chinese in Torreón (1911); the rebellions of Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Tabasco; and the Paláez saga. He pillories nobody, and shows understanding for men such as the archvillain of the Vulgate, Huerta; Carranza, an irritant to both the left and the right; and Obregón, the man who defeated Villa and Carranza. Knight always tries to understand and explain how something happened, “wie es eigentlich gewesen.” He escapes from the trap of the inquisitorial and moralist fallacies, and shows a healthy scepticism about much of the statistical evidence of the period, and toward schools and “rollo”; he avoids the Marxist frying pan without being consumed in the flames of any one model or system. As he writes (I, 84), “a degree of controlled (not promiscuous) theoretical eclecticism is fully justified—even recommended.”
If Knight has one favorite target, it may be “revisionism for its own sake, the seed bed of so many theses and learned articles.” The empiricist quality of his book may turn him into the next authority, the standard for a new generation of historians. I do not know if history repeats itself, but we historians repeat one another. Knight repeats nobody and is prudent in his propositions. When he presents hypotheses, they are clear, well formulated, and developed with concrete verifications. His principal point is that “the revolution [of 1910-15] was a genuinely popular movement … [one] of those relatively rare episodes in history when the mass of the people profoundly influenced events. At such times, national politics are only explicable in terms of local and popular pressures” (I, xi). For him, it is “the great and heroic popular movement typified by Zapata and described by Tannenbaum … a popular, agrarian movement, the precursor, the necessary precursor of the étatiste ‘revolution’ of post-1920.”
A quarter of the book is dedicated to the years 1915-20, the least studied, the most obscure, and the formative period of the étatiste “revolution,” when the “revolution from above [as Barrington Moore, Jr. says] built on the ruins of the prior revolution from below.” Knight, always careful with analogies, is not afraid to say that such a revolution is “in a sense, a successful, populist equivalent of the trick the Chinese Kuo Ming Tang failed to turn in China.” As a neo-Porfirian revolution, it was able to “harness the energy and grievances of the popular movement to antithetical ends—state building and capital development” (II, 527). In a strong statement, he notes that “[m]ajor wars have been the midwives of change in the twentieth century. In Mexico’s case, the war was civil, not international, but, by virtue of its totality, it had comparable, far-reaching but unplanned consequences” (II, 518).
Similar to the position taken in Xavier Guerra’s Le Mexique de l’Ancien Régime à la Révolution (Paris, 1985), Knight writes:
It was the last of the “great” revolutions which following a Tocquevillian rather than a Leninist model, remained essentially national, produced no ideological blueprint or vanguard party and, above all, served to reinforce rather than to subvert many of the features of the old regime it overthrew. We may echo Tocqueville more precisely … hence the outcome was a “government both stronger and far more autocratic than the one which the Revolution had overthrown” (II, 497).
The works of Knight, Guerra, and Hans Werner Tobler (Die Mexikanische Revolution 1876-1940, 1984) complement one another more than they compete, however. These three historians, perhaps comprising a European school on the Mexican Revolution, offer us extensive syntheses on different but complementary periods, while U.S. scholars are systematically producing hundreds of Ph.D. theses that in part provide those ambitious men material with which to build.
